17 May 2017

Winnipeg Folk Festival, Show with Oysterband, the East Pointers and Matt Byrne, July 2016

I'll tell you right from the startIf you've got love in your heartYou've got everything I need to seeYou're beautiful to me - Alan Doyle, "Beautiful To Me"

Your new record and book are also looking very beautiful to me.

From the Rock to Bob Rock - recording the "A Week At The Warehouse" record in Vancouver, 11 songs in 7 days, January 2017 - due out in October (pic from Alan's Twitter)

Written over the course of this Birthday Year, also due out in October (pic from Random House Canada, taken by Vanessa Heins)

I'm going to break with long-established tradition and wait on the customary Year That Was pic/video Review portion of the Birthday Blog, mostly for practical reasons: Time is running short and if I get only a part of this up on your actual birthday, this year (unlike some prior years) I'd rather it be the Accomplishment/Advice portion. Because this year, there are no doubts about what to say. Well, almost no doubts. There's always room for at least a wee bit of doubt.

Perhaps best to say fewer doubts this year than in some others. Your accomplishments over this past Birthday Year would be ample enough for many to lay claim to with pride as a decade's output. You wrote your second (sure to be best-selling) book, you wrote and recorded your third Alan Doyle album with a legendary producer and your own amazing band, you took that amazing band (in various configurations) on the road for something in the neighbourhood of 100 public and private gigs, including Boots & Hearts, Cavendish Folk Fest, Winnipeg Folk Fest, George Street Regatta Roulette, FireAid for Fort Mac (as both performer and co-host), Fermilab Particle Accelerator, Belleville with the lights out, your largest solo-career crowd (so far) in Kitchener's Centre In The Square, and an utterly triumphant night in NYC...a delightfully large number of those gigs sold out to the doors.

You also created a charming new character - the Time-Travelling Historian - on the Murdoch Mysteries, provided a moving narration for Newfoundland At Armageddon and appeared in Trail Of The Caribou. You found time to do fundraising for (these being just a few of the many) Kids Eat Smart, Memorial University Alumni, Smiling Land Foundation, Hope Live, Sarah McLachlan's School of Music Society, Gold Medal Plates (across Canada and all the way to Portugal and South America), and for a park in the tiny Newfoundland town your cabin is in. You also found time to work on your latest project for mental health and addictions foundation-funding, you helped to open the new National Music Centre in Calgary, and you co-produced (and co-wrote songs and performed on) bandmate Cory Tetford's brilliant new album In The Morning.

Then there's that matter of your being named the NL Humanitarian Of The Year by the Canadian Red Cross, where immediately after receiving your award (that after an unforgettable introduction from your show-stealing son - "I love my Dad; he loves me more" ), you and that amazing band put on a show during which you sang the song you wrote for your parents, to your parents. That moment alone made it very hard for me to resist choosing this as your Biggest Accomplishment of this Birthday Year. It wound up very close to the top, winning the secondary award as the moment I was most proud of you this year. It had some competition there too. It's been that kind of year...again.

I'm going to save ANewfoundlander In Canada ("Always Going Somewhere, Always Coming Home" - I may never be able to stop telling you how perfect that is, how much I love it) for next year, not because I'm not thoroughly impressed by all of the day-off writing you did while on the road to meet your deadlines, but because I want to be able to specifically quote all that I know will be wonderful in your book. What you have said about the breadth of the scope of that book has me counting the days until October, when I am sure I will eagerly read it from cover to cover as soon as it's in my hands. The first reading. The ones that come after may be a bit more leisurely.

For this Birthday Year of yours, the accomplishment that stands highest above most other folk's Decade Best is, in my opinion, the new record, for two reasons. Reason Number One is that this is your first true Alan Doyle & The Beautiful Gypsies Record, your first Band Album with this spectacularly talented group of people you've brought together. The Beautiful Gypsies are no longer merely your touring band, not now that they've poured their own passion and energy into the fashioning of each song on this record; A Week At The Warehouse was created by all of you and it in turn plays its own part in creating you as a stronger, more-unified whole, each member of the band needful and necessary to the completion of that whole.

This is is a breath-taking, double-edged Act of Creation, and it happened right there in Bob Rock's Vancouver studio, Bob Rock himself being, of course, Reason Number Two why I'm picking this as your Biggest Accomplishment of this year. You now have a Bob Rock-produced record, filled with the songs you have written, which this consummately skilled and unabashedly iconic Artistic Force was glad to produce - Metallica, Motley Crue, Bon Jovi, Bryan Adams, The Hip...and Alan Doyle & The Beautiful Gypsies - and to which your amazing band members have given the fullness of their own prodigious talents. Not easy for much of anything to trump all of this for the Accomplishment Award. (I have to say "not easy" instead of "impossible," because I have learned well never to underestimate you - if you had more time in this Birthday Year, you very well might have outdone even this.)

But it is indeed quite late in this Birthday Year - technically past for you, so safe enough for my final accomplishment-picking - down to the final few waning minutes over here on this side of the continent (needing and using my full PDT advantage this year), so on without delay to the Advice for the Year To Come. But that advice requires a bit of a preface.

Early on while thinking about writing this blog, I was sorely tempted to choose one accomplishment that surpassed even the From The Rock To Bob Rock wonder and awe of the new record. I resisted that temptation, but the more I thought about it, the more intertwined that other accomplishment became with the advice I had already decided to give you. Although "intertwined" is seldom a synonym for "clarity," I'll try my best to sort it out in the allotted time.

While reading through the Happy Birthday messages sent to you on Twitter today, it was impossible not to notice how many people, especially those who know you personally, carried on the theme of what a hard worker you always are. This was also where my thoughts had been while going back through this past year, the same as happens when thinking back on each and every past year that I've been witness to what I know is only a small part of just how hard you truly do work. Witness as well to how achingly weary you sometimes get as a result of it all. I will somewhat reluctantly confess that even when I may have disagreed with your efforts at doing this or that or whatever, even when I may have wished with all my heart that you would give yourself a break and stop pushing yourself so hard so much of the time, I have invariably, irresistibly, found myself deeply moved by and abidingly respectful of the whole-hearted persistence of those efforts of yours.

So much so that I really did consider how hard you have worked for the year's Biggest Accomplishment, before deciding against it for two reasons, the first reason being that it could easily - terribly easily - take that prize every year, and the truth of the matter is that along with being moved and respectful, there is also the worry and the concern, understandable enough, I hope, for the ears that hear the hoarse voice, the eyes that see the shredded fingers and the slumped shoulders, the heart that hopes for a bit of rest after the brilliant lights go down.

The second reason how hard you work is over here in the Advice portion is difficult to explain - tangly and complicated and I fear I am going to shag up that explanation attempt. But I am not going to tiptoe around it.

Humility is a rare and wonderful thing, Alan, something to be treasured in others whenever we encounter it because of that very rarity and wonder. With all that you have done, with all that you have created and accomplished and achieved, you continuously refer to yourself - think of yourself - as the Luckiest Of Men, and there is a genuine humility in that which is priceless and dear. And true in that there will always be a measure of Luck - good and bad, fortune and misfortune - in our lives, for those of us who work as hard as we possibly can, as well as for those of us who hardly bother to work at all. But only a measure. The greater part of what we do or do not accomplish in our lives will surely be the result of what we do or do not attempt, the result of the positions and places in which we put ourselves to allow luck to either smile upon us or smite us or pass us by, the result of the opportunities we have had the cleverness to seek out and the courage to accept.

The heartfelt gratitude you consistently show for all the good things in your life is laudable, even inspiring. It is always endearing, will always be so. It's a fundamental part of who you are, and who you are is a good man with a kind heart who works harder, who tries more to do what he thinks he is supposed to do, than almost any person I know and who deserves every single one of those good things he has in his life.

It's permissible to be both lucky and deserving, Alan - there are and will always be those in this beautiful-but-sometimes-unfair life who do not get what they deserve based on their efforts, for the good and for the bad - and what I hope for you, what I advise for you in the Year To Come (and all the years that follow after) is that you give an equal amount of acknowledgment to that which you know you have earned as you give to that which you believe you have been given. Because the balance of those two aspects is an integral part of seeing yourself and accepting yourself as that good man with a kind heart who works hard and deserves much, a good and wise man who is thankful for the rewards of his efforts and grateful for the grace of his luck.

That Man could accomplish Anything his heart desired. He could be sure that he need not make the same mistakes that some around him have made, because no matter what anyone else might think of him, he would know beyond doubt who he is, what path he has chosen to walk, and what he wants to become. That Man could let himself be loved; he could see in himself the Beautiful that others can so clearly see in him.

He might even be able to get a bit of rest now and again. Dreaming Big, I know. But that's what Birthday Wishes are for.

Happy Birthday, Dear Alan. Again and still. With Love. Again and still.

I'll add in Year That Was pics & vids bit by bit after posting this while it's still the 17th.